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Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

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Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#371
The Google drive unlimited policy has been predictably abused by some of the datahoarding and piracy communities. Those groups have been paranoid for[1] a[2] while[3] that this could and was likely to go away, including tracking changes in the way Google marketed this to users.

People with pirated movie collections took this risk more seriously than a guy whose livelihood appears to be inexorably linked with the policy.

[1]https://forum.rclone.org/t/any-unlimited-alternative-to-goog... [2]https://forum.rclone.org/t/google-drive-unlimited-alternativ... [3]https://www.seedboxexpert.com/end-of-unlimited-google-drive/

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#372
Can anybody recommend a good solution for automated synching of photos and files between my Google Drive and my Pi NAS? Something that makes mirroring a deletion possible but not accidental, so that if the Drive loses data it won't get mirrored to my NAS?

Is rclone and rsync the way to go?

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#373

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying fo…

I think the bigger issue here is that 237.22TB is not trivial, yet, it is still a gargantuan task to actually get a hold of a human being at Google.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#374

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying fo…

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

"Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position."

Agreed that this is a crisis but it is not impossible.

You can use 'rclone' - running on your own system or hosted elsewhere - to move data between cloud providers.

You don't rely on your own bandwidth - they talk directly to one another:

  rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever
... and if you don't want to bother even installing rclone, you can run it somewhere it is already installed:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:blah s3:some/bucket/whatever
Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google aws are capable of).

I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:

https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) […

He already needed to have 5 users in his workspace to unlock unlimited storage.

He might actually have 5 people on his team. Adding 100+ more just for the 2TB each would almost certainly get his account flagged for suspicious activity.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.

Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)

Big part is deduping. If they have a million images that are identical they can just store one and symlink the others.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#378
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free tier storage is 100% not the place to put it. It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing clo…

Sorry correction. 20$ a month for an enterprise account formerly unlimited - (which is pretty much free considering how much data is being used ~ 7 cents a TB if my calcs are correct). Now that account is a 100$ / 25 TB. for 273 == 1000 $/month. https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/942777-no-more-unlimit...

It required at least 5 users to unlock unlimited storage from what I see online. $20 * 5 = $100. Not that it makes what he's getting any less than a steal.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#379

A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent). For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in…

the unlimited plan was phased 7 months ago [0] so got few notices, with the final one 7 days before termination. so the guy with 250tb of data neglected that for half a year and now is surprised. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937436

TFA suggests that the previous communication on the matter stated that the account would go read-only, not that any data would be lost. Do you have any evidence that suggests other notifications were sent between?

The thread you link to above says “People using anywhere from 5.??TB all the way to 152TB … got the email” but I assume that email is the one already mentioned which states large accounts are going read-only.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their abysmal user support is the number one complaint. How the f*ck didn't they wake up to this issue by now. I think they are in dire need of a leadership change. If they want to serve businesses, they need to adopt actual business practices.

Support doesn’t scale so Google doesn’t want to do it out of greed and immaturity.

If any given user needs x support hours a week, and their business pays for > x support hours a week, then support scales.

I guess as you scale up a business you want to get leaner and you accept lower margins, hoping to make it back by volume? Maybe that's what you mean?

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